Do you agree with Nayar’s view?
“the ideological loading of most of the arguments in cyberspace postings authorizes the view that English learning is seen as a part of the process of preparing them (the learners) for the chance of joining us (the native speaker community)."
Nayar, in Us and Others: Social Identities Across Languages, Discourses and Cultures By Anna Duszak.
Oh, this is more of that paranoid navel contemplation that’s so common in the academic world. This type of academic is generally bigoted against some class of people or other that he considers dominant, whether it be “native speakers”, “whites”, “men”, “the ruling class” or whatever is in vogue in that regard, and they love to concoct evil mentalities and project them on those classes of people. A lot of what they say is going on in the minds of the people they analyze is actually just going on in their own minds.
If what he says is true of native English speakers, it’s doubly or triply true of speakers of other languages who post online. I used to post in another language that I’m supposedly quite proficient in, but since it’s the language of a small country that very few foreigners learn, I was treated as a sort of spectacle. The native speakers on the forums never paid any attention to the content of what I said, and never answered my questions, but simply started arguing about my language. Generally they’d take some detail of my text and argue over whether or not it was a natively acceptable way to say it. I could never get answers to anything, so I started posting in English instead of in their language. When I posted in English, they paid attention to the content of my post, commented on it and answered my questions. When I posted in their own language, they ignored what I said and focused on how I’d said it.
At least native English speakers pay attention to what the person with faulty English is really trying to say.
I think you have a bad case of paranoia there, Jamie.
Why do you think they did that? What did they want from you?
…
After analysing online posts of the TSL-L interest group, Nayar notices that “inadequacies in the use of English are often interpreted as some kind of deprivation, whether cognitive, intellectual, social or emotional.”
Not really. I’m not scared of the people; I just consider them to be bigoted and detached from reality.
They didn’t want anything from me. They just couldn’t get past the spectacle of a foreigner using their language. In their own country, I sometimes had to repeat things because people just stared at my head like it was a big TV, and sometimes salesladies grabbed my arm, pulled me around, and made me talk in front of the other people working in the stores. Once a woman didn’t answer my question at all, but just looked me up and down. A native-speaking friend burst out laughing, because, according to him, I’d asked the question perfectly, but the woman was trying to figure out if I was a foreigner, if I’d just had a bad car accident, or what.
They might consider you detached from constructive argument.
They didn’t realise that those pointy things sticking out of your head were not antennae but horns instead? :twisted:
When I first came to Japan I noticed people do this. I studied in an area where there weren’t many foreigners so from the look of their face you can tell that it was very hard for them to comprehend people other than the Japanese can speak the language. And I think from the way I look people were always suggesting that I was Japanese, brought up outside Japan, or half Japanese, because of the broken Japanese, I assume.
But now that I mingle with engineers/professionals, I noticed that they really pay attention to what is being said not how I said it.
And last Saturday, I was on a plane from Kuala Lumpur to Narita and I sat next to a Japanese. I fooled him long enough but was busted when he used a Japanese proverb that I didn’t know. He was surprised I didn’t know the proverb, but he was surprised that he didn’t notice that I was foreign, then he admitted to weird ways I said things. What surprised me the most is, he said “What? You’re not Japanese?” and me saying, “What? You speak English?”
His English was flawless, at least to my ears. Not many Japanese can speak English as good as him, at least outside Tokyo area. I think we can find a lot of good speakers of English in Tokyo.
Turned out he’s been in the States for 15 years and now he is a president of a tooling company in India. (What was I thinking?)
I think I really need to pay attention to what is being said, not who said it.